24 באוקטובר 2013

Do the individual and his or her rights disappear behind the over-emphasis on cultural identity? By Stephen Law

My approach to
this question will be to look at two arguments for restricting young people’s freedom
of thought and expression on the grounds that this is necessary if they are to
develop a robust cultural and moral identity.

I favour what I
call a Liberal approach to moral and
religious education. By a Liberal approach, I mean an approach that emphasisesthe importance of encouraging young people to think independently and make
their own judgements on these important matters. A Liberal approach lies at the
opposite end of the scale to what I term an Authoritarian approach, which
encourages an attitude of deference to some external authority. Authoritarians
suppose children should be raised to realize that what is right or wrong,
religiously true or false, is not for themto judge – they should defer to those who know.

Traditional moral religious
education has often been Authoritarian, with an emphasis placed on policing both
behaviour and thought. A colleague who was educated in the 1960’s in a strict
Catholic school tells me that, even today, a half-century later, she still
feels guilty if she dares to question a Catholic belief, despite the fact that
she gave up religious belief decades ago. However, it’s not just religious traditionalists
who can be Authoritarian. Totalitarian atheist regimes have been no less
obsessed with restricting freedom of thought and expression.

Today’s Western
societies are fairly Liberal, certainly compared with the past. We’re free to
make our own judgements about which religion if any is true. We are also free
to make our own moral judgements. Of
course, we’re not free to do whatever
we want. We’re not free to drive at 150mph down the motorway, but we are
entirely free to believe, and publicly express the view that, we should be free
to do so. It’s freedom of thought and expression with respect to moral and
religious questions that Liberals defend, not an anarchistic freedom to do
whatever we want.

Modern Liberal
thought draws on, and is historically at least partly rooted in that period of
our intellectual history known as, the Enlightenment. The French intellectuals
Diderot and d’Alembert define the Enlightenment thinker as one who,

trampling on prejudice, tradition, universal consent, authority, in
a word, all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for himself.[i]

Daring to think for yourself is a core
Enlightenment value. In 1784 Kant wrote a short magazine article entitled “What
is Enlightenment?” Kant, not normally known for his brevity, came up with one
of the most quoted characterizations:

[Enlightenment
is the] emergence of man from his self-imposed infancy. Infancy is the
inability to use one’s reason without the guidance of another. It is
self-imposed, when it depends on a deficiency, not of reason, but of the
resolve and courage to use it without external guidance. Thus the watchword of
enlightenment is: Sapere aude! Have
the courage to use one’s own reason![ii]

“Sapere” and “Aude” are, not uncoincidentally, the names of two
philosophy for children organizations. Philosophy for children is very much an
Enlightened, Liberal idea, and in arguing that children should be raised to be
autonomous, independent critical thinkers, proponents of P4C are promoters of a
core Enlightenment value.

Not everyone is quite so enthusiastic about that value, particularly
in the classroom. Some social and religious conservatives believe that to encourage
children to think independently and make their own judgements is to sow the seeds of disaster. They argue that, without
some religious Authority in the classroom to which children are encouraged to
defer, children are cast perilously adrift. They insist that, in the absence of
some external Authority, morality boils down to nothing more than individual,
subjective preference and choice. Every point of view becomes as “correct” as
everyother. So a Liberal approach – which removes external Authority from the
classroom – is a recipe for moral decay and catastrophe.

Those who take this view are, in my view, muddled. In my book The War For Children’s Minds I tackle a
range of arguments offered by those critical of a Liberal approach to moral and
religious education. Here I explain the failings of just two amongst many particular
lines of argument. Both involve the thought that development of a robust cultural and moral identity requires more orless uncritical acceptance of certain cultural norms and values, at least earlyon, and that a P4C approach is therefore likely to be culturally and morally destructive.

1: The Character Building Argument

How do we become
good? One popular answer emphasizes the importance of building character by instilling good habits. It runs as follows.

Being good and
living well are skills, just like, say, being able to ride a bike or play the
piano. And skills are primarily acquired, not through thinking, but by doing.
Just as we can’t intellectually work out how to ride a bike, then hop aboard
and confidently cycle off in style, so neither can we intellectually figure out
how to be good and then immediately proceed to behave well. If we want people
to behave well, we have to drill into them the right behavioural dispositions.
It’s in having such dispositions that having “good character” consists, and
it’son instilling those dispositions that “character education” focuses.

In his The Principles of Psychology, the philosopher
William James emphasizes how important good habits are to living well. He
begins with a comical illustration of the force of habit:

There is a story, which is
credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a
discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!'
whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and
potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become
embodied in the man's nervous structure.”[iii]

James believes that, just as soldiers are drilled to obey
commands to the point where doing so becomes automatic and unthinking, so we
should similarly drill ourselves in behaving in ways advantageous to us.

The great thing… in all
education, is to make our nervous system
our ally instead of our enemy… For
this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful
actions as we can... The more of the details of our daily life we can hand
over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of
mind will be set free for their own proper work.[iv]

James believes
that it’s by repetitive drilling from
a young age that good character is developed. If we want to behave well, themere desire or intention to act well is not enough. We must instill the right
habits, so that good behaviour becomes unthinking
and automatic.

No matter how full a
reservoir of maxims one may possess,
and no matter how good one's sentiments may
be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely
unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially
paved.[v]

James argues that
unless the right habits are ingrained early on, the fabric of society is under
threat. Habit is “the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious
conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of
ordinance”[vi].

Aristotle,
like James, also emphasizes the importance of instilling good habits. Aristotle believes children will not spontaneously develop such
virtuous character traits as honesty, integrity, generosity, fortitude, perseverance
and orderliness. Their nature, to begin with, is to do whatever they feel like
doing. They are led by their own immediate desires. It’s only through training
that they will acquire the habit of
behaving virtuously.

However, unlike James, what Aristotle is after is not
mindless, automatic behaviour. As Sarah Broadie, the author of Ethics With Aristotle explains,
Aristotle’s view is that

[f]orming a
habit is connected with repetition, but where what is repeated are (for
example) just acts, habituation cannot be a mindless process, and the habit
(once formed) of acting justly cannot be blind in its operations, since one
needs intelligence to see why different things are just in differentcircumstances. So far as habit plays a part, it is not that of autopilot…[vii]

What we should get
into the habit of doing is reflecting and applying our intelligence in order to
arrive at the right judgement, and then acting upon it. This is not something we can do unthinkingly.

According to
Aristotle, by getting into the habitof behaving well, so that it becomes second nature to us, we are able to learn
two valuable lessons.

First, we learn
that behaving in these ways is good.
This is not something that can be figured out purely in a purely intellectual
way. We need personal experience of what living virtuously is like before we’re
in a position to appreciate that this is how we ought to behave. And we are only
able to have that experience if we have been disciplined and habituated into
acting well by some an external authority. It’s only by being forced into the
habit of behaving thus that we’re able to recognise for ourselves that this is
how we should live.

Second, having
been properly trained, we’re released from the grip of our own immediate
desires, and so able to live that
way. So it seems an individual trained
in the way Aristotle recommends acquires both a kind of knowledge and a kind of
freedom that the child left to his or her own devices will never attain.

Character education

There’s much
intuitive plausibility to character education and the view that habit has a key
roleto play in moral education. According to character education, key is to
ensure good habits to be reliably passed down from generation to generation, as
part of a cultural tradition. But then shouldn’t moral education, focus not, as Liberals, suppose, on thinking and reasoning, but rather on ingraining those important traditional cultural
and moral habits?

That moral
education should be rooted in the instilling of good habits is an increasinglypopular point of view. Numerous books have been written to help parents and
schools build character, including best-sellers like Character Matters – How To Help Our Children Develop Good Judgement,
Integrity, And Other Essential Virtues, Character
Building – A Guide For Parents And Teachers.

In
the U.S., character-building has caught the popular imagination. Many see it as
the cure for the so-called “moral malaise”. Thomas Lickona, for example, says
that:

The premise of the character education movement is that the
disturbingbehaviours that bombard us daily – violence, greed, corruption,
incivility, drug abuse, sexual immorality, and a poor work ethic – have a
common core: the absence of good character. Educating for character, unlike
piecemeal reforms, goes beneath the symptoms to the root of these problems. It
therefore offers the best hope of improvement in all these areas.[viii]

Indeed,
character education has been a focus of both the Democrat and Republican
parties. George Bush’s plan for education, No
Child Left Behind, specifically funded character education. Character
education has, according to one proponent, Kevin Ryan, become the “new moral
education”.

The new moral education is
not a fad. Instead, it is a break with the faddism that characterized much of
the moral education of the Sixties and the Seventies … [T]he new moraleducation is really quite old; indeed, it is deeply rooted in classical
thinking about education. [Some of it] comes straight from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle said that
a man becomes virtuous by performing virtuous acts; he becomes kind by doing
kind acts; he becomes brave by doing brave acts. A school that institutes a
community service program is merely operationalizing Aristotle.[ix]

Proponents suggest
there’s growing evidence that character-building programs are effective.[x] Character education is
increasingly seen, not as an optional extra that might be added to the
curriculum, but as the framework within which good teaching takes place. Here’s
Hal Urban, a high school teacher, testifying to the power of character
education to transform a school:

I’ve
had the good fortune to visit schools all over the country that have character
education programs in place. The first word that pops into my mind when I visit
them is “clean”. I see clean campuses and buildings, hear clean language, and
see kids dressed cleanly and neatly. I see courtesy being practiced by everyone
– students, teachers, administrators, custodians, and cafeteria workers. Most
important, I see teaching and learning going on in an atmosphere that is
caring, positive, and productive.[xi]

But if character
education is the way forward, doesn’t that mean abandoning the Liberal approach?
Surely that approach, with its emphasis on individual autonomy and the use of
reason, should be replaced by character education, which places the emphasis
where it should be – not thinkingbutondoing. Surely we need to cultivate
good habits precisely so that individuals don’thave to start thinking about what to do.

The attack
sketched out in the preceding paragraph commits the fallacy known as false dilemma. It insists we choose
between two alternatives that are, in fact, entirely compatible. We can have
both character education and a
Liberal approach. Indeed, note that, unlike William James, Aristotle actually emphasizes the importance of thinking in combination with doing.

Certainly, the Liberal approach doesn’t rule out character
education. But it’s consistent with the instilling of good habits. We can enforce good behaviour even while at the same time encouraging a critical,
questioning attitude. We can say that, while we expect students to behave in certain ways, we certainly
don’t wish them to swallow whatever we say blindly and uncritically.

So a Liberal
approach to moral education is consistentwith character education. Indeed, it requiresit, for at least two reasons:

(i) A Liberal, P4C approach can only work
within a fairly disciplined environment where children have gotten into the
habit of listening to different points of view, calmly and carefully
considering them, and so on. So it seems a Liberal, P4C approach does
inevitably need to be paired with something like character education.

(ii) One of the virtues we should be promoting is that of thinking
critically and independently and getting individuals to take seriously their
responsibility for making moral judgements. But, to be effective, this is
something we need, not just to tellthem about, but to get them into the habitof doing, so that it too becomes second nature. In which case an effective
Liberal moral education must inevitably involve an element of character
education.

So, yes, the
Liberal approach needs to be paired with character education. But the reverse
is also true: character education needs to be paired with a Liberal approach.

One obvious
potential problem with “character education” is that it can be used to ingrain
not just noble and virtuous attitudes, but also racist and sexist attitudes
too. Suppose we ingrain in our young the habit of treating women as domestic
serfs. If our offspring are raised to treat women in this way, without much
exposure to critical thinking, no doubt they will find the belief that a
woman’s place is behind the sink “obvious” and will in turn pass it onto theirchildren. In this way, such “obvious” beliefs as that women should stay in the
home and that Jews are untrustworthy will merrily cascade down the generations
without ever being effectively challenged. The “character” each generation
develops will be sexist and racist.

An important
safeguard against this potential problem is to add a further habit to the list
of habits character education should aim to instil: the habit of thinking carefully and critically about our own beliefs
and attitudes. I stress this needs to be a habit, a habit introduced fairly
early on. If it’s introduction is delayed until those sexist and racist beliefs
and attitudes have got themselves fully ingrained in the child’s character, it
will then be very difficult to get them out again.

So, far from being
in opposition, character education and the kind of Liberal approach to moraleducation advocated in this book actually complement one another.

Many proponents of
character education are clear it’s compatible, and should be paired, with the
fostering of independent critical thought. But not all. For some, “character
education” is a useful banner under which they want the opportunity to drill the
young into mindlessly accepting their own religious and moral beliefs. They are
looking to instil specifically religioushabits, to get them firmly ingrained in children while their intellects are switched
firmly off. Advocates of character
educationare aware of such divisions within their ranks. Take for example,
this quote taken from an article at the character education website www.goodcharacter.com.

What
is character education? This is a highly controversial issue, and depends
largely on your desired outcome. Many people believe that simply getting kids
to do what they’re told is character education. This idea often leads to an
imposed set of rules and a system of rewards and punishments that produce
temporary and limited behavioral changes, but they do little or nothing to
affect the underlying character of the children. There are others who argue
that our aim should be to develop independent thinkers who are committed to
moral principals in their lives, and who are likely to do the right thing even
under challenging circumstances. That requires a somewhat different approach.[xii]

It does require a
different approach – a Liberal approach. So I think we should say yes to
character education, but let’s be clear that it needs to be Liberal in nature –
and that it is entirely compatible with the approach advocated by P4C.

2. MacIntyre and the unavoidability of tradition

Another objection
to the view that morality can be given a wholly rational, tradition-free
foundation is that reason is itself
dependent upon tradition. The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre argues that
it’s not possible for an individual to conjure morality out of thin air,
independently of any tradition. Indeed, according to MacIntyre, whatever forms
of reasoning we employ are themselves born of and dependent upon tradition. So
it’s impossible to do what Kant attempted to do: apply reason on an individually,
independently of any tradition.

[A]llreasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought.[xiii]

There is no
possibility of the my “stepping outside” of all tradition and thinking from a
tradition-free perspective, for what I am

is in key part
what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I
find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it
or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition.[xiv]

But
if Kant is wrong to suppose reason can be applied independently of all
tradition (because every application of reason is inevitably rooted in sometradition or other), doesn’t that, in effect, spell doom for the Liberal
approach recommended here? For isn’t the Liberal approach all about individuals
applying reason for themselves, independently
of any tradition?

No, it isn’t. Liberalism does notinvolve defending the view that reason alone can conjure up morality all by
itself. What Liberals defend is the view that children, and indeed, adults,
should be encouraged and trained to think critically about the tradition in
which they find themselves. Pointing out that reason cannot be applied
independently of all tradition does nothing to undermine this point. In fact, MacIntyre
himself agrees that “[n]othing can claim exemption from reflective critique”.[xv]In applying reason, we may look to and draw
upon a tradition. MacIntyre may even be right that we have to. But that’s not to establish that we should be encouraged,
at any stage, blindly and unquestioningly to accept our tradition’s cultural
religious, moral values.[xvi]

Of course, not every defender of Authority-based moral
education wants to turn us into unthinking Jamesian automata blindly treading whatever
path tradition lays down. That’s true of former UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks, for example.
Still, while he is not recommending complete, blind, unswerving loyalty to
whatever tradition dictates, it’s clear that Sacks and others believe the young
should, in the first instance, adopt an attitude of deference to what they bothcall “external authority” on moral questions.

Sacks, for
example, says that before we can properly criticise a practice, we need to set
foot within it, “finding our way round it from the inside”. This, says Sacks,

presupposes distinctive
attitudes: authority, obedience, discipline, persistence and self-control.
…There is a stage at which we put these rules to the test. We assert ourindependence, we challenge, ask for explanations, occasionally rebel and try
other ways of doing things. Eventually we reach an equilibrium… For the most
part…we stay within the world as we have inherited it….capable now of
self-critical reflection on its strengths and
weaknesses, perhaps working to change it from within, but recognizing that its
rules are not a constraint but the very possibility of shared experiences and
relationship and communication… autonomy takes place within a tradition.[xvii]

So
Sacks acknowledges the importance, in a mature citizen, of a critical,
reflective stance towards his or her own tradition. But he emphasizes we must
first be fully immersed in that tradition. And he stresses the importance of
deference to Authority in the earlier stages of assimilation. Sacks believes

autonomy
– the capacity to act and choose in the consciousness of alternatives – is alate stage in moral development… It is not where it begins.[xviii]

What
Sacks means by “a late stage” is unclear. At what point Sacks is willing to let
individuals adopt a more reflective, critical stance towards their own
tradition? At eleven? At fifteen? At twenty five? It’s hard to say. In fact
it’s not clear whether reflective, critical examination of the tradition in
which you are brought up is something Sacks is at any stage be willing to encourage. He acknowledges only that it spontaneously
happens at some “late stage”.

So
while Sacks is prepared to tolerate some freedom of thought and expression at
some unspecified point in the individual’s development, it’s clear he wants
moral education to be muchmore Authority-based than it currently
is (or at least as it is outside the more conservative religious schools). He
believes more emphasis should be placed on more-or-less uncritical deference to
Authority than it should on independent critical thought (at least until some
“late stage”).

My
question is: why is more-or-less blind, uncritical acceptance of the
pronouncements of Authority required at any stage?

Sacks cites MacIntyre in support
of his Authoritarian stance on moral and religious education. But MacIntyre’s
plausible point that reason is inevitably rooted in tradition – that it cannot
be applied independently of any tradition – does not require that individuals
should be discouraged from applying their own powers of reason once they are able. And it’s clear from
studies that children are remarkably adept at applying their critical faculties
to moral questions from very early on. Some immersion in a tradition may be
required before their critical faculties can be properly engaged. But once they
are engaged, once the child is striving to engage them, once they are beginning
actively to question and explore (which comes very naturally to them), what is
the case for actively suppressing their application to moral and religious
beliefs? Particularly until, as Sacks puts it, some “late stage”? For if Sacks
wants to restrict the child’s ability to think and question until some “late
stage”, he is going to have to actively suppress this natural tendency.

What Sacks tries to
extract from MacIntyre’s point about tradition looks suspiciously like an
open-ended invitation for him to shut down the critical faculties of youngpeople long enough to get them heavily religiously indoctrinated. Sacks leaves
the door open for years and years of
religious programming at the hands of some moral Authority, sending new
citizens out into the moral world intellectually armed with little more than a
tokenistic, last-minute bit of critical reflection grudgingly tolerated at some
“late stage”.

If that’s what
Sacks is after, he’s going to need a much better argument to justify it. MacIntyre’s
plausible point about the impossibility of applying reason independently of any
tradition does not support it.

Children, surely, have a right not to have their bodies stunted, crippled
or mutilated in the name of certain cultural religious, moral or aesthetic
traditions and values – such as the Chinese practice of foot-binding or the
cultural practice of female circumcision. I believe children have a similar
right not to have their mindscrippled and stunted in the name of certain cultural, religious and moral
traditions. I would argue that they have a right to freedom of thought and
expression. They also have a right to a quality of education that will give
them the skills they’ll need if they are to be able to distinguish facts from
myths and spot intellectual snakeoil when they come across it. These rights are
trampled if cultural and religious identity is used to justify enforcing
conformity of belief and suppressing potential dissent.

We’ve
looked at two particular lines of
argument used to justify restricting children’s freedom to think critically and
independently about the cultural, religious, moral, and other values and
traditions with which they are raised. The first argument draws on the
philosophy of Aristotle and emphasises the importance of instilling good habits
in children. The second draws on the
work of e.g. philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre and turns on the thought that
morality cannot be thought up by an individual from scratch, independently of
any tradition. While neither argument is cogent, both are popular amongst
critics of a Liberal, P4C based approach to moral and religious education. Liberals
should be prepared to encounter them.

[xvi] By the
way, I am not suggesting that MacIntyre
thinks otherwise. While MacIntyre is a well-known critic of “liberalism”, it’s
less clear to me to what extent he would wish to be critical of
Liberalism-with-a-capital-L. See the appendix to this chapter.